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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Chris Doss points out an error in Ticktin's view
that the Soviet population ever offered any political opposition to the
bureaucracy. But that does not take away from the fact that Ticktin pointed out
the utter depletion of the Soviet Union's economic dynamic when both the regimes
apologists and its cold war critics were colluding in a massive
overestimation of the quality of Soviet industrialisation, the latter
uncritically reproducing the former's quantitative output figures.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Only Ticktin, as far as I can see, anticipated the
economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and deduced it from the economy's central
failing - that it had abolished the market without creating an alternative
economic regulator. 'Planning' in the USSR remained an empty letter because the
bureaucracy distrusted the populace too much to put them in charge of the plan.
And Ticktin worked out that the Soviet economy had run out of
steam 1973, in his essay, 'Towards a Political Economy of the USSR', when
everyone else was lauding, or bemoaning Soviet success.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Nostalgia for Brezhnev says very little about what
happened then, and everything about how people feel
now.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>